Metal corrosion for nanofabrication

The annual cost of corrosion has been increasing globally, and it has now reached beyond 3% of the world's gross domestic product. It remains a challenge to reduce or prevent unwanted corrosion effectively after many decades of effort. Nowadays, more efforts are being made to develop anti-corrosion platforms for decreasing the huge cost of corrosion. In parallel, it is also highly expected to be able to use corrosion for producing useful materials with reduced energy consumption. In this review, recent progress in how methods for controlling metal corrosion can be used to produce structure-diversified nanomaterials are summarized along with a presentation of their applications. As a valuable addition to the scientists' toolbox, metal corrosion strategies can be applied to different metals and their alloys for the production of various nanostructured materials; this also provides insights into how metal corrosion can be further prevented and into how corrosion wastage can be reduced.

Room temperature synthesis and optical properties of small diameter (5 nm) ZnO nanorod arrays

We report a simple wet-chemical synthesis of ∼5 nm diameter ZnO nanorod arrays at room temperature (20 °C) and normal atmospheric pressure (1 atm) and their optical properties. They were single crystalline in nature, and grew in the [001] direction. These small diameter ZnO nanorod arrays can also be synthesized at 0 °C. Control experiments were also conducted. On the basis of the results, we propose a mechanism for the spontaneous growth of the small diameter ZnO structures. The optical properties of the 5 nm diameter ZnO nanorod arrays synthesized using this method were probed by UV-Visible diffuse reflectance spectroscopy. A clear blue-shift, relative to the absorption band from 50 nm diameter ZnO nanorod arrays, was attributed to the quantum confinement effects caused by the small nanocrystal size in the 5 nm diameter ZnO nanorods.

Synthesis of Carambola-Like CuO via a Chemical Bath Method

By a simple chemical bath method, new carambola-like structured CuO had been fabricated in a solution composed of Cu(NO3)2, NaOH and hexamethylenetetramine (HMTA). The formation of such structure was caused by in-situ dehydration and separation of flower-like petals composed of several pieces of copper hydroxide sheets. The corresponding electrochemical reactivity of structured CuO has been investigated, which demonstrated the potential application for lithium ion batteries.